BSH Home Appliances Optimize Consumer Rebates ROI

Yesterday marked a really exciting day for us at 360insights when we presented our first-ever live case study webinar with our longstanding client, BSH Home Appliance. Our two guests, Michael Glenn, BSH’s Retail Channel Manager and Mary Weston, BSH’s Senior Sales analyst joined us in sharing the story of how BSH has been able to make steady gains in realizing consumer rebates ROI through digitization, experimentation and leveraging business insights from their consumer rebate program, as well as various channel incentive programs.

Note: The recording of the webinar and accompanying slide deck are embedded at the bottom of this article for your convenience.

It Started With a Rebate Fraud Problem…

Back in 2011, Bosch came to 360insights, then knowns as 360incentives with a problem they sought to solve: consumer rebate program fraud. Their head auditor knew that their existing program was being gamed but was not able to satisfactorily contain the fraud through existing means.

While many of our clients come to 360insights with a marketing problem they want to solve (like obtaining data insights or improving CX), Bosch was first looking to solve an incentive fraud problem in both their spiff and consumer rebate programs, so that was the priority for them back in 2011.

BSH first approached 360 through mutual business connections. They had identified that they had a risk of financial exposure on non-compliant claims. They recognized that they didn’t have the expertise in-house to audit incentives effectively. Our solution solved their problem, and it solved it in a way that excited them because we were leveraging the power of digitization in combination with advanced algorithms that significantly increase the efficacy of enforcing compliance.

Consumer Rebate Insights Inform Winning Strategy

Here’s a fun new fact about how your rebate program data can help your company to better achieve its goals: At the recent Digital Marketing World Forum in NYC, the Head of Analytics for Consumer, Government & Entertainment at Google shared a stat that businesses operating with data-driven strategies are averaging 2.6 times more annual sales growth than the control businesses in the study.

What does this mean for those of us who operate consumer rebate programs? Well, as a baseline it means that if you are not collecting and sorting as much data as possible at every step of your program, you are not building up the necessary assets you will need to capitalize on a significant point of leverage that ought to live well within the realm of your existing work.

Bosch may have originally come to 360 with a fraud problem that needed to be solved, but the “better mousetrap” of rebate program digitization soon began to reveal many new ways of making the BSH Home Appliance team’s work easier. Firstly, digitization enables the scaling of many previously manual processes, reducing administrative burden. Additionally, the team can now work smarter as insights from their rebate program data reveal ways to continuously optimize different aspects of how the company looks at, plans and executes incentive programs.

A Powerful, Still-Emerging Opportunity

Before we get into this one, let’s start with a working definition of customer or consumer experience. Customer experience is your customers’ perception of how your company treats them. These perceptions affect their behaviours and build memories and feelings and may drive their loyalty. In other words: if they like you and continue to like you, they are going to do business with you and recommend you to others.

According to a Walker study, by the year 2020 customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator, meaning that people are more likely to share social media posts and other stories about their experience with your brand than about the actual product they bought from you. All of this is to tee up the notion that solving for top-notch customer experience is something that is now measurable in both action and effect.

The BSH consumer rebate program portal is an excellent example of digital experimentation, testing and insights being leveraged to improve the consumer experience. Over many iterations of the workflow and measuring consumer behaviour over millions of claims, we have worked with BSH to make the rebate process as simple as possible; maybe even fun! We get into this in much greater depth in the presentation which you can watch below, but the results speak for themselves: BSH’s NPS survey results for both product and consumer rebate experience are incredibly high; higher than even brands such as Amazon and Apple.

100% Claim Audit Reveals Compelling Upside

Our CEO and founder, Jason Atkins has long said that the world of incentives is a world of fraud. The fact is, wherever there is a program in place offering any reward, cash or otherwise, fraudsters will try different ways to test the system. They will examine a program for vulnerabilities where they could game the system through loopholes or gaps that could enable the processing and payment of fraudulent claims to dishonest and unqualified parties.

Traditionally, a typical consumer rebate program was a 100% paper-based and manual process and here’s where another high point of leverage is realized: digitizing 100% of the data associated with every single claim enables tremendous audit opportunities.

For one, digitization allows us to review mass amounts of data both algorithmically and, if need be, manually, against known fraud patterns and trends to prevent fraud. Digitization also allows us the opportunity to quickly change both our audit technology and audit practices, keeping pace with the or just ahead of the fraud as we identify it in the data. These types of sweeping, effective measures are just not possible when data lives on paper claims stored in boxes and tucked away.

There is so much more that was shared in the webinar, and the perspectives and insights that Michael and Mary generously shared are well worth your time if you are running incentive programs and looking for ways to increase your consumer rebates ROI. The essential underlying principle here is this: this was a story about the power of digital transformation. BSH’s pioneering (at the time) decision to move to a digital solution back in 2011 has given them a broad and deep data set from which they can now draw consumer rebate insights that help them continuously meet their business objectives, increase consumer satisfaction and protect both their brand and budget.